So after reading a bunch of articles where Bloggers claimed to use iPad as their primary computer machine, I was intrigued by the fact that you can carry your work with you literally anywhere, even when you are travelling light.
Whenever I go out I take a bag with me that can’t fit a laptop but would fit an iPad.
By making the iPad my primary machine, I can literally take my work anywhere though that sounds cool, I still wasn’t sure if I can really get my work done using a Mobile OS.
So I am using iPad mini as my main computing device from last one month and the results are pretty good. The iPad Mini is not the fastest iPad out there but I chose it for it’s form factor and compactness, because if I could manage a full sized iPad, I can definitely manage to carry a small netbook like the Acer Aspire V5 I used to carry on short trips.
Choosing iPad mini over a full sized iPad was a tough decision to made as I had to compromise on a few things which I’ll be talking about below.
When I am out, I may not work on things that require a lot of computing power such is editing videos and images or tweaking my website design by player with the codes, these are the tasks I like to do on my desktop computer and when I have plenty of time.
Most of my times goes in writing and I am able to write full articles on my iPad mini. That too without using a physical keyboard.
Whenever I am out I get only a few minutes (say 15 to 20 Minutes) between other tasks, I use that time to either write or do a research for a post and I love doing it on the iPad mini, I have used mobile phone for this and have even blogged about it, but I find a tablet PC much more useful because of the bigger screen size as you can do more in less time.
The iPad opens the web pages that look pretty much the way they look on a Desktop, so it’s easy to understand the content, take notes and save links for your future posts.
Same goes for writing, you basically can see the entire A4 sized page on the screen when helps you write more.
The tool I am using for managing my writing is a simple app called Writebox, which is the only app I found that supports saving files to Google Drive, where all my work is saved.
I use Trello as a to-do list, capturing ideas, long and short term goals. It is available for multiple platforms so I have it with me every time.
Canva is a nice tool for creating the images I use for my posts. It is not very pleasing to use it on the iPad Mini but I rarely do it when there is something important to be published.
Because not only editing or developing images is tough, even formatting the posts is a challenge, perhaps due to the slow processing speed of the iPad Mini and perhaps the newer iPad Mini would be more efficient. But then the WordPress app is not rich enough to offer tools for rich publishing directly from the app.
Though the WordPress dashboard of my blog can be opened in the Chrome browser, it reloads itself automatically when I move to another app or open another tab in the Google Chrome itself. Reloading messes everything up taking me back ot where I started. So, formatting posts is not the best thing I love doing on the iPad.
So, I guess for now, the iPad is useful for writing posts which you can save to either Dropbox or Google Drive and published them from a PC or Mac after the required formatting.
Having said that, I still love writing on the iPad and making use of the time I wouldn’t do anything at all.
It is indeed a useful tool which is not just for Watching Movies and Reading Magazines as mentioned by many people who love to call the iPad a bigger iPod touch.
I am thinking of buying a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad mini and see if it increases my writing.
We will see that in coming weeks, but till then, I am enjoying the comfort of writing articles whenever I can.
This post was written and edited on iPad mini itself.